I was at the check-out counter of the Whole Foods in Hyde Park and the cashier had asked me if I wanted a bag for the single bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice I had just purchased.

"Why not?" I said.

When from over my shoulder I heard these words:

"Because it’s bad for the environment."

I turned slowly to look at the person from whom this noise had emanated. She was in her 50s, dark hair, reading glasses. And the look on her face was one of smug condescension.

This irritated me, though I tried not to show it. Instead, I said, in a manner I thought was genial enough, "You know, I think I’m going to have to disagree with you on that."

I had just started to tell her why, when she held up her hand to stop me.

"Never mind," she said. "I don’t want to hear it."

And I thought (but didn’t say), "How very environmental of you."

That was several months ago. But I thought of that woman when I recently read that Kroger Corp., the largest supermarket chain in America, had announced a plan to stop providing plastic bags to its customers by the year 2025.

"The plastic shopping bag’s days are numbered," said Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, accepting and spreading the gospel of the "green" activists.

What a relief that will be for my scold at Whole Foods. Though maybe not. She might quite reasonably ask McMullen, "Why not by 2019?"

Why indeed!

Still, there are millions of Americans who believe the War on Plastic Bags is more than a bit overwrought. Is it possible that plastic shopping bags provide greater convenience and utility to the human race than they do a risk to Mother Earth?

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A customer carries their items from Kroger to their car in plastic bags in Newport, Ky., on Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2018. (Photo11: Albert Cesare / The Enquirer, )

Kroger sure thought so when it introduced the plastic shopping bag back in 1960s. After an initial reticence by the shopping public, the use of them took off thanks to their easy-to-carry portability and quickly discovered reusability. They were cheap too.

According to The New York Times, each plastic bag costs about five times LESS than a paper bag to produce. So no wonder almost every store in America went to providing them instead of paper bags.

The "environmentally conscious" point out that plastic bags take too long to biodegrade, up to 1,000 years. But I say, so what? Dispose of them properly, stick them in a landfill, and they don’t do anyone any harm.

We’ve all seen photos of plastic bottles and other plastic trash washing up on beaches and what not. This is not an environmental problem, it’s a littering problem. And most of the plastic litter that finds its way into our oceans, comes from China, Indonesia and other Asian countries, that don’t have the infrastructure, money, or space to build proper landfills.

We do.

Here’s an interesting factoid: According to the Garbage Project, run by a Harvard-educated Arizona professor, if we were to build a landfill, 44 miles square and 120 feet deep, it could hold all the garbage and trash Americans produce for the next 1,000 YEARS!

Now, of course, we won’t do that. Landfills have to be close enough to population centers to make economic and environmental sense. The point is that this is a big country with a lot of land and room to dispose of our trash – including plastic bags – safely and responsibly.

Not even the liberal folks at the website Vox believe that plastic bags are the environmental threat they’re being ginned up to be.

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Vox’s Joseph Stromberg reports that Americans throw out 10 times more food by weight than than we do plastic bags. He says that our focus on plastic bags is misplaced when it comes to real environmental threats like "climate change." (Me, I think thermonuclear war is a greater threat to the human race than either plastic bags or climate change, but that’s an argument for another day.)

There have been food chains in other countries that returned to providing plastic bags to their customers after realizing the business and environmental benefits of the ban weren’t what they’d hoped.

Whole Foods, where I met the nice lady I referenced above, is still a paper-bag only operation and has been for years. Shoppers there are also wholly encouraged to bring their own cloth bags to cart their groceries home.

Good idea? Not according to a 2008 UK Environmental Agency study looking into all this. British researchers found plastic bags "had the smallest per-use environmental impact of all (bags) tested." While "Cotten tote bags... exhibited the highest and most severe global-warming potential by far since they require more resources to produce and distribute."

So go figure.

Plastic or paper? Or cloth? You decide. That is, if your friendly neighborhood supermarket will still let you.

Gil Spencer is a Hyde Park resident and member of the Enquirer Board of Contributors.